From Paid Content: Digital subscriptions hit 250,000 by the end of September (up 30 percent in the last 12 months), while freely registered users grew by 40 percent, owner Pearson (NYSE: PSO) reported on Thursday. The publisher stopped offering its iPad and iPhone apps for download on August 30 after failing to gain an agreement from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) which would have meant the FT could continue to process its own customers’ data and transactions. This update therefore includes only one month of post-iTunes numbers. The majority of the gain was experienced since the FT’s previous update in July. Now the FT is claiming...

CNet has an interesting, fairly long interview with Josh Quittner, who was formerly the director of Time Inc.’s digital magazine strategy as well as Time.com’s editorial chief before quitting to take a job as editorial director for Flipboard. Quittner is a veteran tech journalist and editor, which makes it all the more fascinating he would take a position at such a young startup. Quittner explains that he was drawn to Flipboard by the changes that are taking place in the context of magazines. Flipboard represents a chance to break out of the traditional one-size-fits-all template magazines have used...

It's now at version 2.8.5.  According to iTunes the update includes: Improved page turn animation on iPad and new book-style page turn animation on iPhone.  Enable this in application settings. Adjust brightness while reading on iPhone - tap the Aa button to change screen brightness Simplified feedback and customer service contact - please continue to sending us your feedback! Localaized app language in French, Spanish, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. ...

Ten years ago, the original iPod came out, changing Apple inexorably from a snooty little computer company whose best days were seemingly long behind it to one of the greatest powerhouses of the consumer electronics industry. Today it seems likely Apple is going to kill off the last vestige of that original hard-drive-and-music-player-only device. Yesterday Gizmodo took a look at some of the complaints and erroneous predictions of low sales surrounding the original device, and pointed out a CNet review by Elliot Van Buskirk predicting that descendants of the iPod might replace the PC. The funny thing is,...

The next Apple event is set to take place on October 4th, and the invitation going out to journalists is captioned, “Let’s talk iPhone”. This caption has led to speculation on the part of tech journalists that the new iPhone will include advanced voice-recognition features that have been in the offing since Apple bought Siri 18 months ago. They also speculate that Apple will just be introducing only one new phone—and not the rumored “low-end iPhone” that some investors have been expecting. Rather than a new low-end model, Apple can just continue to keep last year’s iPhone around as...

On CNet, Donald Ball surveys a number of suggestions for what Apple can do to improve the iPod Touch, Apple’s “forgotten” iOS product. I’ve long held that the iPod Touch is Apple’s true “game-changer”. Maybe it doesn’t get as much press as the flashier iPhone and iPad, but it’s essentially a phoneless iPhone, containing most of the desirable features without the obnoxiously expensive contract. I have an 8GB 1st-gen iPod Touch that continues to be very useful for many purposes—I can whip it out to check my email anywhere there’s wifi, even if I don’t have my laptop or iPad on me,...

You can definitely write articles about the Kindle, but you shouldn’t use the definite article with (the) Kindle. That’s the thrust of a Wall Street Journal article that discusses how careful representatives of many modern companies are to avoid using “a” or “the” with their products. Kindle, Nook, iPhone, BlackBerry, Wii, the list goes on. The idea seems to be to make the devices seem “personal and human”, presumably by talking about them more as if they were people than products. (After all, you wouldn’t say “the Chris Meadows”. Well, unless you were asking, “You’re Chris Meadows? The Chris...

Form the news release: The latest update for Kobo iOS Application is now ready for you to download and enjoy. 4.5.2 Kobo application update for your iPad, iPhone and iPod contains new and exciting features, as well as improvements to overall performance of the application. New features and improvements include: • Faces and Places Reading Life Feature: Kobo iOS app users gain access to exclusive and enhanced book content, and experience unique and entertaining way of sharing their reading progress with friends. • Multitasking Feature: While downloading books to your Kobo library, you can read your books, surf the net...

Smartphones can be used for plenty of things other than information retrieval. Case in point: Amazon has released a new iPhone app aimed at college students. A fine-tuned version of its previous iPhone shopping app, Amazon Student will not only allow students to shop for textbooks and other products Amazon carries, but also let them resell items they already have though Amazon’s Trade-In program. Students can use the iPhone’s camera to take pictures of the bar code of the items for a quick listing. Then they can print a shipping label, and Amazon will send them a gift card...

This isn't ebook related, but I mention it as a public service since I know that a lot of our readers have Apple equipment.  Here is the description of the app from the App Store: The free FBI Child ID app provides a convenient place to electronically store photos and vital information about your child so that it's literally right at had if your child goes missing.  You can show the pictures and provide physical identifiers such as height and weight to security or police officers on the spot.  Using a special tab on the app, you canals quickly and easily...

I’ve mentioned mobile app patent troll Lodsys, and the problem it represents, a number of times. Apple has committed to helping developers fight off the troll, but some iOS developers think that might not be enough and have committed to forming a collaborative legal opposition front that can possibly react faster than Apple can. "We will let the patent trolls know: if you attack one indie, you attack all indies, and we will file every motion we can against you, we will attack your patents, and we will show you for the mafioso thugs you are,"...

I was able to get a day off from my day job, and so I will be attending GenCon this year, August 7th through 10th in Indianapolis, in order to cover e-book-related matters for TeleRead. (If any of our readers or contributors will be in the area and would like to meet up, let me know.) And there certainly will be some such matters to cover. While GenCon started out as a strictly role-playing game convention, it has expanded to take into account other media, much like ComicCon. There are a number of events relating to non-game-related writing, and quite a...